Infrastructure First

Published 2012-06-05 @ 12:00

This is the seventh entry in my One Pagers series.

2009-08-17

The Problem:

How do we smooth out deployment/testing/integration/etc?

The Solution:

Implement all infrastructure first.

• Start with using idiomatic project structure so there is no learning curve.
• Implement your basic test suite, starting with a sanity test. Get it to pass.
• Implement deployment automation and actually deploy (blanks) several times.
• Write all your project and deployment documentation up front. If any of it takes more than a few sentences, you’ve failed.
  • Test it on a newb who’s never seen your project before.
  • Watch them try it out. Everytime they mess up is a failure on your part.
• Almost all of this should be made into a template so it is reused next time.
• Nothing should be much more complicated than:

% scm checkout projectname
% rake newb env:test deploy

If it is, it is still too complicated and can (and should) be cleaned up.